The Real Matrix: The 278th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
We begin with the HHS announcement that Covid shots will no longer be recommended to healthy children and pregnant women. What does healthy mean? And what are the conditions that provide release from liability for vaccine makers? Then, a discussion of kinds of immunity, and how vaccines are best delivered depending on how disease is transmitted. We compare what was claimed about the shots (they stop transmission!), and what Pfizer later admitted (that they did not know if the shots stopped tr...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, live stream number 278.
I know for sure this time, because you just told me.
And it is kind of late spring at this point.
It's feeling pretty good here.
Pretty nice and warm out.
So good.
We have our hungry young men, whom we call sons back.
They are back, which is, it is marvelous to see them.
They seem a bit more worldly, which is not surprising.
It is a cliche, but it is stunning how much protein a young man managed to put down.
Really, truly stunning.
I did cook about a week's worth of food for you and me last night on the grill, and I think it is mostly gone.
Yeah, no, I mean, oh man, and I also made potatoes, and we had rice and beans from the night before, and chicken from the night before, but chicken, salmon, sausages, asparagus.
Mostly gone.
Mostly gone.
It's amazing.
It is amazing.
Yeah.
All right.
No Q&A today, but we did one recently, and that's up on Locals, as is The Watch Party right now.
consider joining us there.
And we have, as always, our three carefully chosen sponsors right at the top of the hour, which...
So if you hear us reading ads at the top of the hour, you know that we are truly vouching for what they are doing.
Our first sponsor this week is BrainFM.
Attention is one of our most precious attributes.
Even the language that we use around it reveals some of the depth of relationship that we have with it.
We can get someone's attention, give someone our attention, stand at attention, pay attention.
There's so many ways to be engaged.
And of course, there are nearly endless ways to be distracted.
Buy food in the fridge, if you have any anymore.
And clutter in the fridge.
And clutter in the living room.
By the necessary maintenance of machines, the gardening, the grocery shopping, the laundry, the appointments to be made and kept, all of it.
And then there are the notifications.
You have mail, texts, calls, likes, new follows, new content, on and on and on.
Do you want to pay attention, be truly at attention on a task that feels worthy and honorable and suited to your skills and aspirations?
Well, Brain.fm might just help.
Brain.fm is an app that provides intense music designed specifically to boost productivity.
Inspired by and based in scientific research beginning in the 1990s, the people behind Brain.fm have created music that syncs brain patterns, helping you focus better, if that is what you want to do, or relax more deeply, or even sleep more easily.
Brain.fm's music demonstrably and quickly helps you find and stay in a state of flow.
Research published last year It is still last year.
Research published last year in the journal Communications Biology found that listening to music with strong amplitude modulation, the exact music to be found at BrainFM, increases the ability of listeners to hold their attention on tasks.
The amplitude-modulated music found at BrainFM was found to be more effective than other auditory inputs at improving executive control and helping listeners engage in activity with sustained attention.
Anecdotally, we've heard from several listeners who have had great success listening to Brain.fm.
Says one person of the dramatic effects of listening to Brain.fm, I am now able to do one thing at a time, and it keeps my brain in just the right place to facilitate being fully present.
If you want to stop giving away your attention to the lowest bidder, consider Brain.fm to help you focus, unitask, and get stuff done.
Unlock your brain's full potential free for 30 days by going to brain.fm slash darkhorse.
That's brain.fm slash darkhorse for 30 days free.
Marvelous product.
Yep.
And if you think about it, what better way to spend a bit of money than on something that allows you to take back your own attention from people who have stolen it?
Yeah.
It's a marvelous thing.
Absolutely.
Far better to give your money to someone who's trying to help you than to continue giving it to those who, without your consent or ability apparently to say no, are taking it from you.
100%.
Our second sponsor this week is Peaks Nundaka, an adaptogenic coffee alternative that is powered by cacao, tea, and mushrooms.
Or, as we say here in Dark Horse, cacao to tea and mushrooms.
All right.
This is a fantastic product.
Peek's Tundaka stands out among all the coffee alternatives that are now on the market.
It supports your body and your brain with slow-release caffeine from probiotic teas plus functional mushrooms and cacao.
Peak Sundaka provides energy and gut support without jitters, sluggishness, or crashes.
And if you are looking for a way to bring mental focus to your work, the ceremonial-grade cacao in Peak Sundaka helps to lift your food.
It doesn't lift your food.
Nope.
It doesn't.
It helps to lift your mood.
I'm going to have an enunciation problem all day today, I can tell.
Nandaka is crafted with the finest and purest ingredients sourced from around the world.
It comes in compact sachets and dissolves quickly in water.
Easily transportable, so wherever you go, you can have a delicious drink that brings clean, sustained energy.
Nandaka tastes great, like a creamy, indulgent spiced hot chocolate.
The cacao they use has a particularly high percentage of cacao butter, which enhances nutrient absorption.
The fermented teas in Nandaka are triple screened for toxins.
The many mushrooms in Peaks Nandaka include, but are not limited to, chaga, reishi, and lion's mane.
And unlike many other mushroom coffees, Peaks uses only the fruiting bodies of mushrooms, so Nandaka is free not just of mycelium, but of grains on which mushrooms are often grown.
Peek's Nandaka provides sustainable, all-day energy and makes you feel like you are doing something good for your body.
If you are ready to make the switch and feel amazing, try Nandaka today.
Right now, you can get 20% off plus a free rechargeable frother and a glass beaker, which is really nice, when you shop exclusively at peaklife.com slash darkhorse.
That's P-I-Q-U-E.
Peek.
P-I-Q-U-E.
Life.com slash darkhorse.
Don't wait.
Start your mornings on a healthier, more delicious note while supplies last.
Sashets.
Sashets.
Exactly.
To lift your mood.
Yes.
All right.
Yeah.
I don't know what the connection is.
Yes.
Cow-free.
It's cow-free, but you could actually add your own.
Yeah.
Little cows, though, because the big ones won't fit in your glass.
Exactly.
They would crowd out the sachets.
Yeah.
Our final sponsor this week and this month is Jolie.
Jolie is a beauty and wellness company that purifies water we shower in for better skin, hair, and overall well-being.
I'm going to come back to the overall well-being a little later.
Most municipal water systems, indeed, most water systems, period, use chlorine to disinfect the water, but chlorine is damaging to skin and hair and maybe other things.
Add to that the fact that a lot of water also contains heavy metals, also not good for your skin, hair, and other things, which I will return to shortly.
Jolie makes filtered shower heads so that you can bathe in water which starts out clean.
Jolie's shower heads remove chlorine and heavy metals from your water and have been demonstrated to reduce the shedding of hair in 81% of people who use them.
After showering with Jolie's shower heads, people report that their hair is less frizzy, their skin is softer, and that they are having fewer breakouts.
Okay.
But we've all experienced water filtrations at some point, and one thing that seems to always happen is that pressure is reduced.
Suddenly, where you had a nice high-pressure stream, now you've got a trickle.
This is not a problem with Jolie's shower heads.
The water pressure is still very strong, and now your water is clean and clear.
Also, these shower heads are quite beautiful.
The perfect combination of form and function, and the plumbing pipe is universal, so it's easy to install.
When we were approached by Jolie, our first thought was we don't necessarily need this, as our water is already quite clean.
But we tried out the Jolie shower head and liked it so much, we installed it.
In our other shower.
Also, I would point out that even if skin and hair is not your focus, you are atomizing whatever is in your water and you're breathing it, which I think has serious health implications.
How could it not?
You're breathing in that chlorine, you're breathing in whatever heavy metals and other pollutants.
Is that you coming back to this later?
That is me returning to the point made earlier.
Now it is later.
It is later now.
Yeah, but I really think that this is a vital point.
Hair and skin is marvelous, but what is landing in your lungs is very important.
So, Jolie will give you the best skin and hair, guaranteed.
Head to JolieSkinCo.com slash DarkHorse.
DarkHorse.
DarkHorse.
I don't even know what that is.
The Whore of Babylon, I've now learned, is a biblical thing.
All right.
Head to joelieskinco.com slash darkhorse to try it out for yourself with free shipping.
That's j-o-l-i-e-s-k-i-n-c-o dot com slash darkhorse for free shipping.
And if you don't like it, you can return your Jolie for a full refund within 60 days, no questions asked.
Jolie is also available on Amazon and at select ultra stores.
Get yours today.
Thank you.
All right.
You wanted to start.
I want to start with, I'm not even sure it's a correction in this case.
To be honest, I've talked to a number of people and nobody is entirely clear on what has happened.
But those of you who watched last week's episode will remember that I took Vinay Prasad to task over his announcement that the COVID vaccines were going to be not recommended except for those who were vulnerable.
And what Vinay did not say but was easily inferred from the list of vulnerable people was that pregnant women were still included on the list because they were considered vulnerable and therefore it was argued that they would benefit from the shot, which they clearly won't.
So we had that discussion.
And I said some colorful things about Vinay having negotiated with the devil.
And then an announcement came out later that reflected a different policy.
So do you want to play that clip from Kennedy and Bhattacharya and McCary?
Hi, everybody.
I'm Robert F. Kennedy Jr., your HHS Secretary, and I'm here today with NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty McCary.
I couldn't be more pleased to announce that, as of today, the COVID vaccine for healthy children and healthy pregnant women has been removed from the CDC-recommended immunization schedule.
Last year, the Biden administration urged healthy children to get yet another COVID shot, despite the lack of any clinical data, to support the repeat booster strategy in children.
That ends today.
It's common sense and it's good science.
There's no evidence healthy kids need it today, and most countries have stopped recommending it for children.
We're now one step closer to realizing President Trump's promise to make America healthy again.
All right.
I find that video a little bit hard to watch.
It's very stilted, and these guys are, of course, working incredibly hard.
So I will try to ignore the video and just point out that, okay, this is progress.
They are not going to be recommending these COVID shots for COVID.
So things are better than we had expected.
It's not clear whether this is a change in policy from what Vinay announced or if this was always the policy trajectory and we were just sort of getting there in stages.
But in any case, it was sufficiently correct in its directionality that I had Jen pull down the clips that we had put out describing What I had thought was an error by Vinay Prasad.
So if I have erred, I apologize to Vinay.
We are now in an interesting middle ground where we are apparently not going to have these shots recommended for healthy people.
That's a huge step in the right direction.
It raises the obvious question of what they mean by healthy.
Who is defining healthy and who gets to decide whether or not you meet those standards before you do or do not have these shots recommended to you?
Obviously, we know that many of the people who have been effectively driving health policy in this country are not interested in human health, else they are worst of their jobs if anyone in human history.
But even more narrowly, healthy pregnant women.
We have a long history of medicalizing pregnancy.
Childbirth is risky for humans, more so than for our closest relatives, because we have such long pregnancies with such large-headed children.
But having had two successful pregnancies myself, I know for sure that many variations that simply exist During the time period of a pregnancy can be called into question as indicative of something going awry.
And I'm concerned that where the bodies are buried here is what defines healthy and who gets to tell you you are or you are not.
I agree that there is concern there.
And then maybe even more to the point, the last thing that you should do is give these shots to people who are vulnerable because it's not going to make it better.
It's going to make it worse.
It's going to make them more likely to contract.
COVID, the range of adverse events, is through the roof, which is something we've talked about, and there's a conversation that we should have down the road.
But nonetheless, I will say, behind the scenes in the medical freedom movement, there is confusion about what's going on.
On the one hand, we have seen steps that move in the right direction, which are tremendous.
I mean, the idea that these are not going to be given to children, As a routine vaccination during wellness checkups, that's absolutely huge.
You know, parents were going to allow it because some doctor was going to look them in the eye and tell them, this is the right thing to do for your child.
Kids were going to be maimed.
Kids were going to die.
lives were going to be shortened.
It was...
And so to have that disappear, that's great.
To have the recommendation for healthy people get these things disappear, that's great too.
This has profound implications for liability.
There are two things that are giving the manufacturers of these shots immunity from liability.
One of them is the existence of the shots on the childhood schedule, which That's now gone.
The second thing is the PrEP Act, which causes the emergency authorized vaccines to be covered from liability.
But maybe that's on the list of things that's going to get removed, which would put us in a whole new position.
But nonetheless, there is understandable frustration.
So, hold up.
Yeah.
I don't know what you just said.
What I think you said is there are two ways that manufacturers of vaccines in the United States get emancipated from liability for their products.
I had thought that it was inherently that if you were on any vaccine schedule, like say the shingles vaccine for older adults, that you inherently have liability due to whatever the act was that Reagan passed back in 1986.
But what you have just said is that actually at least one of two things needs to be true in order for your product as a vaccine manufacturer To be free from liability in the United States, which is that it is on the recommended vaccine schedule for childhood immunizations, recommended by the CDC, or it was granted an EUA, an emergency use authorization.
Let me clean that up slightly.
Yes, any vaccine that is recommended on the childhood schedule is immune from liability.
Even when given to adults.
And that follows from the Reagan era, 1986, we think.
I am not certain whether the fact of an emergency use authorization itself grants immunity from liability, or it is simply the fact that these shots were licensed during an emergency and the PREP Act laid the groundwork for, in an emergency, you ostensibly need companies to make these things.
If they are worried about Being sued into oblivion if something surprising happens, they won't do it.
And so they were immunized.
Now, that was really them gaming the system.
But it's not clear to me that it's the EUA itself.
But it is certainly the fact of the emergency context.
And as I understand it, the immunity from liability extends until...
I think it's either 2027 or 2029.
But anyway, even though the emergency is officially over, these shots are still protected.
So we are getting closer to the day when the shots will not be protected.
manufacturers will not in there in my opinion there's no way the manufacturers would leave them on the market if they faced lawsuits for all of the injuries because the It would be interesting to predict what the cover story will be as they get pulled.
So prediction first, which is what you just made, is that as the freedom from liability is set to disappear, they will be pulled, but they will have some story for why.
Yeah, they will have some story for why.
It would be interesting to try to imagine in advance what the cover story might be.
Prediction.
Spike protein.
Turns out to have been an unfortunate choice.
That's the cover story.
And that will be to protect the platform, which is really the problem.
The mRNA platform itself, every feature of it is a problem, whether it's the stabilized mRNAs, the lipid nanoparticles that they're packaged in, or just the simple failure to address any particular cells that do the translating into protein.
All of those things are fatal loss.
Spike protein will be scapegoated.
But there is confusion in the medical freedom movement about why the heck not just pull these things from the market, right?
We all who have delved deeply here know that they should be.
You can't make an argument that some people are so vulnerable that they need them because it isn't obvious that these shots make anybody better off.
It looks like they make everybody worse off.
So people are antsy.
They want them pulled from the market.
And anytime somebody like Kennedy makes an announcement and says, We're no longer going to be recommending them for healthy people.
There's an outcry.
Well, what about the unhealthy people?
Why are we sacrificing them?
And this is the interface between people who see only What we have come to understand is the reality of these things versus those who are being forced to deal with the politics of them.
And I will say, those who early on thought Kennedy had sold us out on this turn out to be wrong.
The prediction of their model is that these things would not be backed off from group after group, that they would still be allowed to be given.
And, you know, we're not terribly far into this presidency, and already we're seeing the number of people for whom the shots are recommended plummeting.
Four months in.
Right.
So that's tremendous progress.
And as much as it pains me to watch these shots still recommended for anybody, I don't know.
In the land of reality, I want to go as quickly as we can to the place where But anyway, we are at least headed in a good direction.
And, you know, kudos to Kennedy's team for making that happen.
Now, it does, I think this is a good place to move on to the second topic I wanted to discuss, which I've hinted at in a couple of previous slides.
This is something that I came to understand, and I will say the process of COVID, the waking up that many of us went through, was a live fire exercise in which we came to understand many things about the way the world that we live in work, including the way pharma works in the context of this emergency and whether it was an epidemic.
I'm pretty sure it wasn't, but it certainly became an emergency based on all of the measures that were imposed on us.
So we learned things in this process, and one of the things that I learned in the process was that my model of immunity, which I had learned in college, was not rich enough because there was an important distinction to be drawn.
There's a locality to immunity.
Immunity that takes place on your mucosal surfaces, where many viruses get into you, is very different than the immunity in your circulation, you know, your lymph and your blood.
And in my discussion, which is now out on Dark Horse, it's an inside rail discussion that I had with Dr. Lon Jones, who is an osteopath.
We were talking about mucosal immunity, which is really the focus of his, I think it's fair to say, the focus of his life's work.
Talked about five carbon sugars and the role that they play in preventing viruses from invading mucosally covered tissues.
And he caused me to understand something about a chapter that we had all lived through, that we all had thoughts about, but that I hadn't fully understood until our discussion.
And it has to do with, we were told, these shots were emerging.
They are spectacular with respect to blocking contraction of the disease.
Matt Borfella has an amazing compilation of everybody from the president on down swearing that if you took these shots, you weren't going to get COVID.
President Biden.
President Biden, right?
Okay, we were all told that, and then we watched the level of protection that you supposedly had from getting the shots plummet, and then it turned out you didn't get any protection at all, and they switched their story, and they told us, oh, what you do get is a reduction in the severity of symptoms, which I'm not convinced was true either.
But it was an amazing change of course that they went from...
It will not spread if we all get the shots.
That's what they told us.
And then it was like, no, you have to do this to prevent yourself from getting very, very sick, which.
Although they still managed, as I remember it, they still sometimes managed to make that a public health argument because it wasn't okay for you to be responsible for overburdening an already overburdened health system.
That was one of two ways they did it.
They said, you'll overburden the system, it's not yours to do.
So effectively, kind of like a, why do you have to wear a motorcycle helmet?
Which is nothing like the justification of we have to stop the pandemic.
Therefore, you have to do your part.
What was the other?
The other was a loosely plausible argument that if your severity of disease is reduced, the likelihood of transmitting it to others goes down, for which I don't think there's good evidence.
But you can imagine if fewer of your cells are busy producing virus.
the chances that a virus, you know, it should drive the R value down from whatever it is without those.
Now, again, I don't think that happened at all, but it's at least...
Yeah, but it would require a demonstration, and certainly before you get around to coercing anybody.
But anyway, my conversation with Dr. Jones caused me to see something in a different way.
And it was this.
You've probably heard people, you've probably even heard us say, as this understanding dawned, that injecting a vaccine, or a pseudo-vaccine in this case, into your arm was likely to be very low quality in terms of creating immunity to the disease, because what you really want is immunity on your surface, on your mucosal surfaces where you contract the disease.
But what I came to understand is that actually what they delivered was guaranteed not to work in the way that they claimed that it did work.
It was guaranteed not to control the spread of the disease because by injecting it into your arm rather than having you inhale it onto your mucosa or something along those lines, it can only prevent the virus from moving between your cells.
Which means after you've already got an infection.
Now, on the one hand, you could say, oh my god, how did they miss that?
Do they really understand immunology this poorly?
And the answer is no.
This is a feature, not a bug.
So this is your consideration.
This is my putting together what I now understand, having come to learn about mucosal surfaces having separate And every time they tell you, oh, there's a respiratory virus, get this injection, you should ask them, why would you be delivering me the antigen or whatever else in this form if my mucosa is where I'm supposed to become immune?
Show me that that can even work because it can't.
So the point is, if you're people who are long time...
We learned during COVID that there were certain moves that were happening, but they're moves that pharma has been developing for decades, where how often does pharma have a patent on some molecule that has some plausible benefit?
Okay.
Oh, great.
You've got a drug.
Cool.
What now?
Well, let's look at the competing drugs.
We're going to have to make it seem like those competing drugs are less effective than our drugs.
We have to make our drug look more effective than it is.
Those drugs look less effective than they are.
And we need to...
We need to make our drug look safer than it is.
We need to make those drugs look more dangerous than they are.
So there's just sort of a set of moves that you have to be able to accomplish, and pharma has mechanisms for doing each of these.
So, for example, how do you make your drug look safe?
Well, here's one way.
You don't do the test yourself.
Huh?
That seems like that would remove control.
Well, no.
What it does is it removes your fingerprints.
You've got a group of companies that will run your safety test for you, contractors, and they know That in order to survive in their business, which is doing experiments on behalf of some large pharma corporation, the pharma corporation has to get the answer that it wants.
So they're in competition with each other to figure out ways to deliver the answer that pharma wants.
So any company that doesn't, any company that does the test straight and comes back with evidence that the drug is dangerous, they're not getting hired again.
So you can expect an entire little industry that always spits out the result that pharma pays for, right?
Giving a shot in the arm to prevent a respiratory virus.
Well, guaranteed to fail, which means there will be no control of the spread of the virus that causes people to want the shot that reduces the severity.
Right?
That's the simple fact.
If they're selling a product, which when you and I talked a bit about this earlier this week, you correctly said, not a vaccine, it's a treatment.
It's a treatment that you take in advance.
It's a prophylactic treatment, but it's a treatment, right?
What you're doing is you're just reducing, you know, your symptoms of the disease.
You're not reducing the fact that you had an infection or that you will pass it on to somebody else, which is exactly what pharma would want.
So anyway, I thought that was, you know, it's like, But symptom reduction doesn't tend to be behind a prescription wall.
Well, and it doesn't And if only your doctor can tell you, okay, you can get this now.
And of course, there were widely and forcibly available, these COVID shots.
But...
Right.
It also isn't going to be...
it's very hard to make the argument for a mandate, right?
You have to reach...
Right, for treatment.
What's more, what other battle did we end up fighting?
Well, we fought a battle over ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, which were both very effective at reducing the severity of disease.
Now, ivermectin at least, and probably hydroxychloroquine as well, have utility in preventing infection also.
But imagine that you actually allowed the marketplace to work.
And you had some people who had a newfangled And then you had some tried and true drugs that had a great safety profile that actually resulted in people who got sick not getting very sick or other people avoiding the disease altogether.
If you were going to mandate something, you'd mandate ivermectin.
So anyway, I guess I'm just coming to realize the...
The elaborate nature of the racket.
And I also was prone to, or I was led to revisit a conversation that you and I have talked about before between a former member of parliament, this is back when he was a member of parliament, Rob Ruse, who had a famous interaction with a Pfizer exec.
Can you play that one for us, Jen?
The Pfizer COVID vaccine tested on stopping the transmission of the virus before it entered the market.
If not, please say it clearly.
If yes, are you willing to share the data with this committee?
And I really want a straight answer, yes or no, and I'm looking forward to it.
Thank you very much.
Regarding the question around, did we know about stopping humanisation before it's entered the market?
No.
We had to really move at the speed of science to really understand what is taking place in the market.
And from that point of view, we had to do everything at risk.
So she's a bit unclear there.
Quite tone-deaf.
But what she says is, no, they didn't know whether or not it blocked transmission.
In fact, they hadn't even looked because they were moving at the speed of science.
When the real translation...
I remember this.
We talked about it at the time, I believe.
The speed of science bit is extraordinary.
That's akin to follow the science.
Like, okay, you just revealed that you're using science as a political battering ram rather than as an actual tool of human understanding.
But they're also prioritizing the market.
Over the actual science.
Right.
In fact, the market is all there is.
And if you think about what she says, oh, no, we didn't even test it.
Because think about it from their perspective.
Well, A, it's not going to work.
So what's the test going to be?
If they do a test that investigates whether or not it blocks transmission, what they're going to find out is that it doesn't.
And if that's what they find out, that erodes their argument for governmental mandates.
So they would much rather not know the answer to that question when privately, I'm betting they did know the answer to that question because they designed a shot that couldn't possibly work.
Why did they do that?
They designed a shot that couldn't possibly work because it's great for business.
And, you know, many of us have intuited this on other topics.
Do these people really want to cure diseases?
Well, that reduces the market for their products.
It seems fairly clear that evolution itself is going to shape an industry that fails to cure diseases and comes up with a proliferating arsenal of treatments that plausibly work at arbitrary risk to your health.
In fact, especially since we have a relatively small number of these pharma giants, if they Cause health problems, then chances are that the drug your doctor gives you for the side effect is going to be from one of them too.
So, you know, it's a racket from one end to the other.
This is the most organized of organized crimes.
And anyway, it's painful to be trying to understand the way this works as a biologist or presumably as a doctor.
Because you just realize you have to translate what they're saying.
Why did they give us a needle-borne inoculant for a respiratory disease?
It's not like inhaled vaccines don't exist.
They do.
And it's not as if there aren't things for which you would vaccinate with a needle.
Rabies.
Rabies gets introduced into your tissue by an animal that bites you.
So you don't want the immunity on your mucosal surface.
You want the immunity in your tissues.
So there's all kinds of arguments for different modes, but why would they have chosen the wrong mode?
That's the thing.
They chose the wrong mode because...
In fact, if you were actually effective at doing what vaccines are supposed to do, then you'd put yourself out of that part of the market.
You would close your own market.
They weren't going to do that.
No.
Because they're not on our team.
No, they weren't.
Well, you prompted me to think a number of things there.
One is we deserve, at the very least, a taxonomy of what would be the right mode of delivery for an actually safe and effective vaccine for all of the lists of diseases for which we are hoping to have a safe and effective vaccine.
And I think anything that's vectored by a biting insect, probably an injection in the arm is the right thing.
So we don't have, as far as I know, a dengue vaccine or malaria vaccine, but yellow fever.
That, you know, a shot in the arm, if it were safe and effective, put that aside for the moment, would be the right mechanism of delivery.
But anything respiratory, flu, any coronaviruses, COVID-19, is not.
Yep.
Simply is not.
100%.
And then another thing, and this is, I did not plan to talk about this today, I'm not gonna read any of it, but my, So let me just say, I wrote about in my substack this week.
Killing your pathogens by crossing an ecological border and making life more difficult on them than it is on you.
Point being in part that, and you know, you will be totally familiar with all the logic, but that is mammals who are both endotherms who generate our heat internally and homeotherms who as Partially a downstream result of being endotherms are homeotherms, who maintain a constant body temperature.
We have a pretty narrow set of internal conditions in which our systems And therefore, so do our parasites and pathogens.
And so unlike, say, a lizard, so all mammals and birds are endotherms and homeotherms, and yet all species have a slightly different optimal temperature range.
And temperature is only one of the many things by which you can change your ecology, but it's the obvious one.
It's the classic example here, right?
So, you know, I talk about fever as a physiological mechanism by which the body Elevates your internal temperature, the idea being that your parasites or pathogens have lower tolerances, being smaller, being shorter-lived, and if you are otherwise healthy, you can withstand something outside of your optimal zone for longer than they can.
It's sort of like the logic of chemotherapy.
I wrote about fever.
I wrote about fasting, about dry fasting in particular, basically taking the sustenance and water away from your parasites and pathogens for a period such that you can continue to survive, but they cannot.
I did not explore it as fully, but I talked about going into the ocean, getting salty to deal with topical problems like fungal infections and bacterial infections on the surface of your skin, and then mostly behind the paywall.
I only went there because it's interesting to talk about and anyone at least anyone who has never had one enjoys talking about bot flies.
So bot flies are these flies that are in the neotropics the lowland neotropics the jungles of Central and South America that are And apparently a huge economic hit due to their effects on cattle in Central and South America.
And they're actually vectored, which I hadn't been totally clear on.
They're vectored by a different clade of mosquitoes than vector malaria and dengue and yellow fever.
So the eggs end up on the mosquitoes, the mosquito bites you, you end up with the eggs on the surface of your skin, then when they hatch out, they burrow into the hole left by the bite, and then you get this larval botfly developing under your skin, which by all accounts is both disgusting and extremely painful.
And so both of us have been lucky enough never to have gotten a botfly, but we know people who have.
And one of the classic Treatments that is described, including in the fantastic book, Tropical Nature.
So the developing botfly has like a snorkel that it sticks up through the surface of the skin so it can breathe.
It's getting sustenance, it's getting shelter in your skin, and it's getting sustenance from basically the decomposing flesh of you around where it lives.
But it needs to breathe.
So it's not getting air from within you.
It has a little snorkel up through the surface of your skin.
So if you slap a piece of meat on top of your skin, like a raw steak or another fantastic book, Neotropical Companion recommends bacon, slap a piece of raw meat on top of your skin where your little botfly snorkel is, and it, in an attempt to find air, will migrate up to the surface of the steak or bacon out of your skin, at which point you can take away the raw meat and throw it away, presumably.
In looking through this, all of this are things you know already.
And looking into this, I found a 1984 paper, long before I had ever heard of potflies, but I don't know if you had heard of them, but long before either of us had ever encountered people who had run into potflies, a 1984 paper finding that, um,
And the one at that point, reliable through all of the instars of the larva, through all the normal stages of botfly larva, treatment that was actually effective in removing botflies was systemic, that is, swallowed use of ivermectin.
Amazing.
Right?
So ivermectin shows up yet again as this wonder drug.
And I haven't heard of it as a treatment against flies before.
You know, it's a dewormer.
But worms and flies aren't closely related.
It's clearly effective against a broad range of parasites and pathogens and things that aren't either, including many cancers.
So it really is a remarkably broad spectrum therapeutic, including for bot flies.
Which again, I hope someday to know it.
Yeah.
A couple things in passing here.
I wanted to just point out the reason that your parasites have a narrow range is because of the underlying logic of tradeoffs.
The narrower the range of temperature that an enzyme is...
Is attuned to, the more effective that enzyme can be.
If it has to be tolerant across a broad range of temperatures, it's much less effective.
So you can put your parasite in a bind or your pathogen by changing your temperature as long as you don't change to a predictable temperature, which is why fevers vary.
But the other thing is what you can't do.
Is yourself be highly functional when you're throwing a curveball at your pathogen?
So why do you feel sick?
because all of your enzymes are out of their optimal range.
And they're all, so basically, an enzyme is a machine built of a string of amino acids.
And those amino acids form that machine structure based on And when you change the temperature, those affinities are altered.
So the shape is off.
So your enzymes don't work very well.
Everyone has heard the word denatured, right?
So when your proteins get denatured, that's what it is.
It's heat outside of its optimal range such that the protein structure falls apart.
Yeah.
I also want to point out, as you were talking about botfly and natural history, it struck me that there's actually a very Good analogy in people's common experience, which is big pharma, which functions just like this, making you ill, feeding off your body.
Yeah, very much so.
Painful, disgusting, just want to get rid of it.
Exactly.
Slap a giant piece of bacon on big pharma and see what happens.
We should do that.
Yeah.
Well, maybe that's what our new HHS secretary is doing for us.
Slapping bacon on big pharma.
Effectively.
Okay.
Effectively, yeah.
As we close that out, I just wanted to point out two other connections.
One, the redefinition of vaccine was always kind of an isolated piece of information.
They redefined the term vaccine in advance of the great vaccine debacle of 2021 and after.
And there's a question about why.
So they redefined it.
immunity to a disease, to something that is helpful.
I've forgotten what the exact redefinition was, but you can understand now that you're thinking about this question of a vaccine that itself is not going to prevent the spread of a disease'cause pharma doesn't want the spread of the disease prevented.
It does make you wonder what they were doing for their own families.
But that redefinition makes perfect sense because you want to bring things You want to bring this treatment in under the umbrella.
Why?
In part because that's the route to getting immunity from liability for it, right?
It's a vaccine.
You can put it on the vaccine schedule for children.
You can get immunity from liability that way.
So they want things that shouldn't be covered under this umbrella covered for their own reasons.
But it also borrows the trust of a population in a term that already exists.
It's like when...
This happens across brands, right?
But vaccine was, for many of us, not for everyone, but for many of us, an idea that had a lot of cachet.
And if they had said from the beginning, it's a treatment with a novel platform.
Almost no one would have been enthusiastic.
Yeah, especially if they'd said a novel gene therapy.
Right.
Everybody would have said, no thanks.
Sorry.
Good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So yes, by delivering it through a needle, which is what most people think the definition of a vaccine is or something like it, they snuck in through our blind spots.
But okay, so they redefined it.
makes perfect sense in light of their business model, what they, how they want to broaden the definition so that they can, you know, use our loose understanding of what a vaccine is to slide danger.
new technologies past our radar.
Okay.
But the other thing is, we've talked about things like yellow fever, which gets introduced effectively through a needle, a natural needle, the mosquito's feeding apparatus, that that is a reasonable disease to at least attempt to create a vaccine that works for it.
Via a needle, yeah.
Via a needle, right?
We've talked about rabies, which is introduced by the needle-like teeth of an animal that has been enraged, that is sick and has been enraged in order to pass on its disease.
Polio, however, is an interesting one here, because if you take the Forrest Moretti model of polio, Also, even more, I'd recommend you read his book, Moth and the Iron Lung.
But his point is, poliovirus is real.
The poliovirus is a almost harmless enterovirus.
It's a virus that exists in your gut and at most gives you some discomfort that migrates out of the gut as a result of gut damage.
And in children, where the gut is lying right on top of the ventral surface of the spinal cord, it actually moves into the spinal cord where it grows.
So, one of the things about polio is that there are two different vaccine modes.
That's right.
There's a needle-based one, which most people will be familiar with, and there's also an oral one.
So that would be a mucosal.
And in the case of Yeah.
Thyroid, I think.
And I don't know the life cycle of typhoid enough to say how that works.
Yeah, there are a couple where the consumer is allowed to choose.
Right, but the conspicuous thing about the polio one is this again suggests that Moretti's model is right because this is a mucosal virus.
You can give a mucosal vaccine that will have some effect in preventing it.
But if what you did was you introduced a vaccine through a needle, it will prevent it potentially from getting out of your gut and getting into your spine.
You would find efficacy in both modes.
One of these modes shouldn't exist at all.
It's not part of this virus's life cycle to get into the spine.
It's not useful for it to be there from its passing itself on.
So anyway, I feel this is a hard one.
This piece of information, this distinction between mucosal and circulatory immunity, but that it pays dividends.
Once you realize how to map it on to all of the things that we know about the various vaccines, for example, that exist already on the market, it's enlightening.
All right.
Go ahead.
Speaking of botflies.
Yes, speaking of botflies.
Actually.
If we could go to monkeys next.
Sure, let's do that.
Okay.
It didn't occur to me, I didn't think we were going to be talking about botflies today, but I've been thinking about botflies this week for reasons I just described.
Knowing now that you can either use direct application of a steak or oral administration of ivermectin to get rid of your botfly infestation, you will remember when you spent your gestation research time on Biro, Colorado Island in the middle of the Panama Canal, Which had on it quite a large population of howler monkeys.
How infected those howler monkeys were with bot flies.
And, you know, we've seen howlers lots of places.
I've never seen howlers like that, and I don't know if it is known, there was a solid group of primatologists working on the howlers there, why those particular howler monkeys are so infected with botflies.
But they were like, faces were often grotesque with these infestations.
I have a guess, and it, well, I have a hypothesis, and it makes a prediction.
The canal is unusual in the sense that it contains this...
But the canal is narrow and so it exists throughout its length near to cattle populations.
And one of the things about cattle is that they actually drive up the populations of certain creatures like vampire bats.
Vampire bats are pretty rare in a pristine, large chunk of tropical forest.
But if you're near cattle pastures, the population of vampires goes way up.
So I wonder if it's not a similar thing where the presence of cattle has this effect.
I also wonder, since ivermectin seems to work for botflies, if farmers Maybe they do anyway because cattle that are infected or that are parasitized by any parasite are less productive.
I wonder if...
Right.
That would be...
And for the comfort of the howler monkeys.
Yes.
So in our Q&A this last weekend, someone asked a question.
One of our local supporters asked a question.
posted a piece from NPR which linked to an article in Current Biology which has a story that neither of us were at all familiar with.
So I'm going to Their supplementary material is actually quite good and not have sound, but we can talk through what we understand about the story.
It is in a different part of Panama.
So actually, let's first say current biology.
Here we can show my screen here.
This is the paper just published.
correspondence rise and spread of a social tradition of interspecies abduction and Here we have some of the supplemental um The supplemental information from this 2025 paper called, again, Rise and Spread of a Social Tradition of Interspecies Abduction.
This is also in Panama.
Actually, I have to go...
Okay, so just a place where we are, for those of you watching here, we're going, it's Panama, and this is in...
One of the smaller islands is Jicaron, and there are two species of primates on this island.
There are capuchons, which are relatively small-bodied.
Very smart, very social, as almost all monkeys are.
Monkeys that actually on this island uniquely are understood to be using tools, stone tools, to break open food.
And then the other species of monkey on this island is a species of howlers.
There are a few species of capuchins and a few species of howlers, but I'm just going to refer to them as capuchins and howlers here.
And so we have...
Capuchins spend a lot of time on the ground.
Basically never on the ground.
Howlers, of course, they howl.
They have these, anyone who's been in a forest with howlers will recognize the sounds that they make.
They're also nearly obligate folivores, so they're entirely leaf eaters, which tends to correlate with, and this is certainly true in the case of the howlers, them being not as smart as close relatives who have diets of other sorts of things.
Capuchins are generalist, have generalist diets.
They eat fruit, they eat insects, they eat small prey that they find.
And with this group of researchers who were not seeking to find this, they're using camera traps to find what they're finding here.
Okay, this is again just a description of the place.
Here I'm going to show video.
And it's going to be a little subtle for those who aren't used to looking at monkey video.
show that again, that first monkey who's going through here I don't think I can.
Oh, wait, maybe I can.
Maybe I can.
Yeah, I can.
This first monkey who's going through, these are capuchins going through, and here we have a baby of...
This is a young male, a juvenile male capuchin, carrying a baby howler monkey.
Now when these researchers first noticed this, they didn't know what to make of it, and they proceeded to see But they know who the players are.
They know the individual monkeys.
This particular monkey they call Joker.
They already called Joker.
And they have...
and this one I'm not going to be able to make full screen.
Oh, my.
Let's keep doing that.
Can you see my screen now?
All right.
So let's go back to the beginning.
If we can.
If we can't.
Okay.
You see here this joker, the name of the young adult male capuchin, who has a different baby clinging to his stomach.
And this goes on and on and on.
We end up, over the course of, I think it's 18 months, five different young adult male Capuchin monkeys with 11 different howler babies, some as young as, they think, a day old, some as much as a month or two old.
These are howlers who should not have been weaned yet.
The researchers see that four of them die.
They imagine that all of them die because a young adult male capuchin has no ability to actually produce milk for a howler monkey baby.
In some of these videos, you hear howlers making cries for the baby.
In some, you see the baby, an older one, releasing and trying to run away from the capuchins, and the capuchins going after them and picking them up again.
And at first, there was a question as to whether or not these babies had been abandoned.
Maybe they were sick, maybe they'd been dropped, and they were thought to be injured, and the howlers had just abandoned them.
No, there is evidence that they are actually being abducted by the capuchins.
So what is going on?
This is an extraordinary story, unlike anything else I've heard.
And it raises all sorts of questions.
Truly disturbing.
Truly disturbing.
I mean, capuchins are really being quite horrifying here.
Yeah.
Now, I will say my experience with capuchins was that they were the meanest of the monkeys that we encountered regularly.
They would throw things at you, drop stuff on you underneath.
They were actually a bit dangerous.
Incredibly smart.
Incredibly smart.
There's a connection here that I feel has to be drawn that I'm a little hesitant about.
But the more I think about it, the more right it is.
Long-time viewers and listeners of Dark Horse will remember a principle of mine.
You own the downsides of your own arguments.
The original version of that Was when we were being accused of jeopardizing people's health by talking about the concerns regarding the COVID vaccines.
And my point was, no, we have a disagreement with others about whether these vaccines are sufficiently safe or not.
But if you're going to accuse us of putting people's health in jeopardy and then it turns out we're right.
Then you own the downside of that argument.
Then you were the one who put people's health in jeopardy.
It's not an argument that we would make, but if you're going to choose that frame of argument, then you own the downside.
Trans folks own the downside of this.
If they're going to invoke clownfish and other cases of sex switching in nature, then they own this example.
This is clearly monkeys behaving as if Mm-hmm.
Um, and it even suggests a possible adaptive explanation for what they're up to.
What the Capuchins are up to.
Yeah.
Now this, I don't, I'm not saying I think this is likely to be the case, but it is a hypothesis that at least makes sense that it's testable.
Which is that these monkeys, by pretending to be female, are able to gain access to females.
This is a she-male strategy, which is a common thing that we see in various kinds of creatures.
And that by carrying a baby monkey around, they could masquerade as females and therefore not necessarily be excluded from contact with other females by dominant males.
Again, I'm not saying I believe that to be true, but that is a hypothesis.
And it makes the prediction about proximity, at the very least, that when carrying these howler monkey infants, that these monkeys are in close proximity with fertile females in the group.
In the capuchin group.
Yeah.
Now, I'm looking.
This is a really extraordinary set of supplementary materials they put together, but in trying to find one particular video, I'm not immediately seeing it.
There is a video that they show.
They do not propose what you have proposed, but they do show, and I think it was Joker rather than one of the later monkeys who adopted this behavior, who was holding a young howler, and he's getting a lot of threat calls from members of his own community.
from other capuchins.
They appear not pleased with him.
It's really unclear, of course, how would we know if that was specific to the fact that he has a baby with him?
Yep.
I think one monkey at the center of a bunch of other monkeys who are yelling at him is pretty unusual.
Yep.
And the only other thing that is clearly unusual about the situation is he's holding on to a baby.
It also seems that, you know, if privatologists can tell, certainly capuchins can tell, that's actually not one of us.
Yeah, I agree, although I don't know if male capuchins are like certain male great apes and maybe not that observant sometimes.
But I thought, but how would you get, I thought your hypothesis was about access to females.
Right.
But the superficial, oh, these researchers, if I read correctly, their first instinct on looking at this was, huh, maybe those are capuchin babies that just look weird.
Right.
Because it's the obvious first conclusion.
And I wonder if capuchin males might not.
I mean, again, I'm not arguing that this hypothesis is likely to be true.
I'm just saying it belongs on the list of possibilities and it's falsifiable.
So that's good.
I guess with regard to one of your other points though, I don't, yes, we need to own the downside of our arguments.
Yep.
But when the arguments are just patently wrong, I don't know that holding people to owning the downsides of their arguments is necessarily the best move as opposed to pointing out just how stupid and wrong the argument.
Actually, I think it's much more useful.
Maybe this can go in parallel, but I think it's much more useful to say, here's all the ways that we know that what clownfish can do and what humans can do are not the same.
That there are no examples of actual viable sequential hermaphrodism, which is the scientific word phrasing for switching sex in any organisms with genetic sex determination.
which is to say, you know, our chromosomes are not the thing that inherently describe what sex we are, although they're a really good indicator.
But in all of our In those species, you do have sequential hermaphrodism in some species.
Not a lot, but in some species.
But in those species with genetic sex determination, which includes all mammals and all birds and a few other things as well, do we have any examples of actually viable hermaphrodism?
That it just doesn't seem possible.
Yeah, I don't disagree that that's the stronger point, but they're not mutually exclusive.
My feeling is you own the downsides of your arguments.
Either way, you don't get the upside of your argument and not own the downside.
You own both.
If you're going to make that argument, you're choosing the downside.
It's also true that your argument is garbage.
So I'm perfectly comfortable with both of those things existing next to each other.
And I would also point out a connection here.
So again, I'm not going after people who have serious gender dysphoria and are struggling to figure out how to live their lives.
But the activists who are pushing every boundary, are obliterating every protection of women, are making life impossible for gay folks, These people seem to have at least a profound indifference to the suffering of others, and maybe even a delight.
And so a couple of weeks ago, I don't remember how many weeks ago, but several episodes back, we were talking about, I think it was last week, it was uterine transplants were being worked on.
Do you remember this?
And one of the arguments was that trans women suffer from...
I don't have that right, but it was something that was given an acronym and therefore looked official.
Look very medical.
And so now they're like, well, men who think they're women definitely have this condition that women who are actually women but are infertile due to uterine failure.
So that it's an ethical responsibility of society so that they can bring their own sense of themselves into alignment with, I don't know, their own sense of themselves.
Honestly, it's tautological at best.
By gestating children.
Yeah.
Okay.
So that's kind of my point.
Which completely ignores that actually gestation isn't about you, even if you're an actual woman.
It feels like, oh, believe me, does it feel like it's about you?
But that's not the point.
Right.
The point is the child and the child's well-being and the idea that in order that certain people can feel complete in some delusion that we need to bypass any consideration of the well-being of the offspring.
Well, doesn't that look an awful lot like this monkey situation?
Whatever these boy monkeys are doing carrying around baby howlers is about them.
And the indifference to the well-being of the howler babies is truly shocking.
Yeah.
Right.
They're literally starving to death.
They're literally starving to death.
Although, I mean...
But the authors of the paper suggest, and they've been watching these monkeys for a long time, and so they have a sense of the very different personalities of the monkeys.
They had the sense that Joker, they don't know why.
They don't know how it started, why it started, what he's up to, and he seems to have stopped.
like it's moved on to these other monkeys now and he's not doing it anymore.
They indicate that he seemed much less indifferent, that he actually seemed to be caring for these babies, whereas none of the other young male capuchins who've picked up the habit do, that they are acting truly indifferently.
And, you know, those babies are doing far worse for him more quickly in the care of these other newcomers to the behavior.
So unfortunately then, my argument...
gets better and better because the idea that this animal joker may have had some dysphoria wanted to be raising a baby monkey commandeered one took some kind of care of it several because he would join but if he was taking care of them at some level right and then it catches on to these other monkeys that don't care at all that does sound an awful lot like
I don't give a thought about your dysphoria because you're killing monkeys.
Right.
I'm not defending it, but I'm saying, well, first of all, in my mind, there is a profound difference between some monkey that's psychologically broken that wants a pet to care for, you know, or is playing house or something.
Some thing that was not gender typical.
And like, yeah, I'm horrified on behalf of this.
This offspring monkey who's, you know, been kidnapped and is ultimately going to die.
But that is a totally different motivation.
Yes, this is true.
than as a fashion appendage or as a mechanism for getting the attention that Joker got for doing something unexpected.
So I don't like this argument very much, but I think the parallels here are Yep.
And for those in our audience who perhaps have never spent time around wild non-human primates, who may imagine that we are attributing too much personality difference, intention, etc., to these monkeys, really it doesn't take much time around wild non-human primates to see how many similarities there are in terms of consciousness.
Personality and behavioral diversity to humans.
Absolutely.
I will also just say that there are myriad examples in nature of strange, cross-species, affectionate relationships, pet-taking.
Yes.
And then there are also captive examples.
The number of gorillas.
Coco the gorilla with the kitten.
Yeah.
I've had a cat, and there was a tragic story when I was...
I don't know if you were aware of it, but there was a gorilla in the L.A. zoo that had a pet cat that he loved the way any of us would, and the cat got hit by a car.
Anyway, it was a very sad story.
So there's a certain amount of creatures wanting some other creature to take care of, it sounds like.
Although I don't know of any of those other stories in which abduction was involved.
You have orphans.
Most of the stories that we know of, because they're easier to know of, involve humans discovering some orphaned brood and seeing if fosterage with a different species of parent will do.
And it's remarkable how often it takes.
Yeah.
Oh, absolutely.
I mean, for one thing, with a mammal, it's a slam dunk.
Yeah.
if you hand raise it Yeah.
No, and then we have imprinting.
Our understanding of imprinting comes from, is it Lorenz or Tinbergen?
It's Lorenz, right?
Conrad Lorenz in the early mid 20th century, who hand raised ducks, geese?
I think they were ducks.
Yeah, and that is some sort.
I think it was ducks.
And then basically could not get them to not follow him around everywhere because he was their mom.
We've all been there.
I have not, actually.
I haven't either, but a lot of people have.
Well, Conrad Lawrence.
Yeah, he was.
He can't anymore.
He's dead.
That is true.
Yeah.
All right.
He's dead, but we may not be, whether we like it or not.
Okay, go for it.
That was your segue.
That's my segue, and I'm sticking to it.
So, I wanted to talk a little bit.
I put out a tweet, which, frankly, I thought was fantastic, and I discovered in the reaction to it that it was not, because a lot of people did not know what I was talking about, and in thinking about it, I realized that it needed a few more words.
But it's sufficiently important that I think it's worth exploring.
You want to put up the tweet?
So I said, remember all that transhumanist talk about beating death by being uploaded to the cloud?
Well, it's happening to all of us right now, for profit, without our permission or any agreement, that we have natural rights with respect to the use or abuse of our emulated minds.
All right.
So let's start with what the heck I was saying and then what it turns out some people thought I was saying that I wasn't.
You don't want to just ask AI what you were saying?
That is only going to make matters worse.
Though people did.
Of course they did.
The idea...
It's related to the singularity, right?
Singularity.
Not necessarily.
Okay.
Singularity is about reaching a point at which the rate of acceleration, it's not inherently about consciousness or anything.
Okay.
So, the idea that, and it's not really your whole self, but your conscious self might be captured and uploaded.
I think it was the most plausible of all of the transhumanist arguments about how we were going to beat death.
But the problem is, it actually didn't beat death at all.
Even if it was completely technologically plausible to put you in a computer, You know, just ask yourself the question.
If we offered you the opportunity, hey, we're going to upload you to a computer and you don't have to die, right?
Even if we give you a body and we let you avail yourselves of all of the joys that a body brings, and it's because your software in a robot, even if the robot gets damaged, we can put you in a new robot, we can upgrade you as we get better technology.
The only thing is, in order to do that and to claim that you have transcended death, we have to kill your biological form in order that your technological form can take your place, right?
How appealing is that?
And the answer is nobody who's going to find that appealing at all, right?
That's a lousy trade.
So it was never a mechanism for transcending death.
But my point in this tweet is...
Like, you know, what makes you alive?
You have a biologist's perspective, which is that we are inherently embodied, that we are made of matter, and that the material being is foundational, and not everyone sees the world that way.
I get it, but my point is, all those people who see it some different way, when we get to the point where it's like, hey, we just gave you a huge upgrade, but we've got to kill you, they're not in.
They like the abstraction, but they're not committed to it in the way that you would be if you really believed that this was a mechanism for transcending death.
My point is not that we are transcending death as we speak, although in one way we are, but our living selves ought to be not comforted by this at all.
does nothing for us.
But what's happening to us is that the product of what we think That is going to allow you to continue on after your body runs into some unfortunate limit it cannot overcome, right?
Especially if you have put a lot into the world so that what the machine understands about how you thought was very sophisticated and precise, then it does mean For example, troubling things like your children can be plagued for the rest of their lives with the ability to have an interaction with a mind that is effectively yours in its complete form.
And we talked about this recently, but at the moment that you died.
Maybe we didn't talk about this on air.
We were, I think we were talking about my father actually.
Yeah.
About how very much I'd like to know, I'd like to be able to talk to him about He didn't have the necessary developmental experiences that we all did who lived through COVID.
That would have changed his mind about things.
Because we all change our minds about things all the time.
If we don't, we are doing something very, very wrong.
Right.
It would be maddening.
It would be like talking to somebody who still thinks that the New York Times is a newspaper.
I mean, I'm half joking.
No, you're not.
But anyway, but imagine, so let's switch between the biological real world and the technological In biological world, you become very important to other people while you're alive, if you're any good at it.
And then you die, because biologically there's no way to protect your body from the various processes, and I'll spare you the details of why.
But at the point that you die, Your loved ones go through a process.
They can put it off for a little bit, but they can't avoid it.
And the process involves editing you down in their minds to the essential bits.
They forget the stuff that's not important, and they remember the stuff that stands a chance of being useful.
And so you kind of get compacted down to a...
Enough of a sketch that you can continue to be useful to the people who loved you, but not your full self.
And as you point out, not a self that continues to progress with the changes that time brings about.
And over time, whatever sketch you were presumably becomes a lot less important to your kids because of that exact process where you're stuck at the moment that you vanished.
And you haven't updated.
And your kids might be able to update you a little bit, right?
You and I might be able to figure out some of what your dad or my grandfather would think about COVID.
But frankly, it's pretty hard.
Yeah.
I don't know.
So the point is, each generation is in some sense automatically, biologically liberated from the previous versions of itself.
And that allows it to live fully.
Whereas if you were inflicted with a realistic conversational version of the dead, it might have a stunting effect on your growing up and becoming fully independent.
And that...
I mean, there's a common thread here between what we were just talking about with regard to...
It's actually about...
Yep, always.
And some of the confusion that we're seeing coming out of tech utopia land, for instance, and trans-activism land emerges in part from childlessness, from not actually having skin in the game in the next generation and not having the lived experience of knowing, of seeing in the next generation That is what it is about.
And as much as they make decisions I don't agree with, and they do things that make it abundantly clear that they are not me, that is how I will live on.
Not by me being forever.
Right.
So, in some sense, we get the worst of both worlds with respect to the transhumanist dream.
The transhumanists want to live forever, right?
And I get it.
Life is really cool.
And nobody, very few want to exit it any sooner than they have to.
However, that is the thing that makes life precious.
What the transhumanists are going to accidentally get is the upload future in which they continue to plague future generations without the joy of getting to experience it, right?
It's the worst of both worlds.
It's really bad, in fact.
Yeah, I think...
Even if you're spending most of your time looking at a screen in a windowless room, there is still experience happening there that is somatic.
You cannot stop the somatic nature of your life.
That is true.
But also, to your earlier point, you should want well-being.
The person who says, well, I don't really care what happens to my kids after I'm gone, that person is a psychopath, right?
You should care deeply what happens to your kids after you're gone.
It's the whole point of the exercise.
So the idea that you might persist in some way that causes them to actually have a new terrible obstacle to have to deal with, which is a fully realized version, a conversational version of you, where they can just go ask dad, you know?
There's a point at which You're better off not being able to.
You can say, I wonder what he'd think, but not being able to ask is a feature, not a bug.
And anyway, this wasn't even really my point with this tweet, but I do think it's an important thread.
My point with the tweet was whether we like it or not, everything that we put into the world is going to be hoovered up into these intelligent machines.
And the people who built these machines have no right to it.
It is only because we speak into the world without a sophisticated model of how to protect our stuff from being built into machines that we get no profit from, we get no joy from, right?
We're consumers of this stuff.
You are literally going to be able to be a consumer of your own thought process in some machine that has, you know, immense compute power and access to your thoughts so it can think better than you.
That's a nightmare, right?
So my point really was, we are being absorbed into a cloud.
That cloud can compile what we think into one big oracle, or it can divide it.
can say, you know, what would Heather think about this?
And at some point it's going to get It's going to be able to do it faster than you can do it by a lot.
It's going to be able to do it decades before you get there, which means the purpose of you thinking is diminished by the ability of something to extrapolate from what you already thought and said out loud.
That's a nightmare.
So anyway, I think this is a frightening, brave new world where, you know, I think the phrase I've used before is putting yourself out of work.
But there's one thing in what you just said that maybe isn't...
But it will predict what I would think now.
Based on who I am right now.
Whereas in decades, I might well think something different because I've had the experience of whatever it is that comes.
And so, you know, this is why life is for the living and not for those who have been cemented at some moment in time, that I don't know what I am going to think in a year.
You know, a year, 10 years, 20 years.
And the AI might well be able to predict it.
And they might do so better than I can predict what I will think.
But it would have to run a whole lot of parallel models about all the intervening events.
And then add to that its modeling of what I will think of those events and how I'll change what I know.
That is not yet history.
That is future.
And so it can't know.
Well, it cannot know 100%.
I agree for exactly the reason you point out.
But it can do a lot better than you might think.
Because for one thing, at the moment, it's looking at a very thin slice of how our thoughts change over time, which is increasingly going to be affected by what AI feeds back to us.
But at some point, it's going to have a longitudinal It's going to know how thoughts tend to change and it's going to be able to do a fair amount of extrapolating.
It's going to be able to look at, you know, a thousand, you know, imagine the thousand people on earth who are most similar to you for whatever reason.
Similar developmental experiences, similar age, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And it's going to be able to do some big data extrapolation that you can't do.
I mean, you know, again, I am not one of these people who is delighting in this prospect at all.
I think this is absolutely horrifying.
This is actually, to bring it back to my thought, this is part of why I want, I wish he were around to talk to about some of these things, because he was instrumental in developing parallel processing computers.
That's right.
Which helped get us here.
And I wonder what he would think of that.
You know, years ago, I went looking for evidence of my grandfather, who you know I was very close to.
You knew him quite well.
And he lived long enough for our children to meet him.
Yeah.
But he did not live long enough to have almost any footprint on the internet other than what...
Yeah.
Right?
Which is some stuff, but it's a pretty tiny footprint compared to what somebody who, you know, had lived another 10 years would likely have.
He was born in 19...
Yeah.
So, anyway, I was just really hoping to point out to people, you're being uploaded.
You're not going to get the upside of that, which is the ability to live on after your death and know what happens or any of the things you might get.
It's cost, right?
Something that can do what you do is going to live on and it's going to mess up your kids' lives.
And what's more, you don't have a contract.
To the extent that things that you think are profitable to the people who own these engines, you're not going to get a cut.
Right?
Like, how terrible is that?
How awful a deal is that?
This is like intellectual slavery where something we have no control over is going to put us out of work and, you know, pretend that we were useless.
Was there a tie-in to Harry?
Was there a connection that you were going to make to your grandfather?
My point was, you know, you're looking for what your dad would have thought based on the fact that the, you know, the rudiments of what's going on Mm-hmm.
you know, earliest rudiments and the surprising facts about what an LLM is and what it can do and what that suggests about the future five years from now.
I don't know how much.
Insight he would have even as somebody who was a contributor.
Well, I'm curious about people's insight, but also about the degree to which they feel responsible and part of the new landscape.
Just more at the personal narrative level.
Much as the people involved in the Manhattan Project famously discussed how they understood their role in unleashing that weapon on the world.
but they were there for completion.
Yep.
So I don't know what the equivalent I don't know what the technology was that was being developed.
I don't know who the people were, but as they watched Hiroshima, before which anyone could imagine where it might go.
All right, well, I have two rejoinders to that.
One is there's a way in which if somebody puts together a very compelling film about a historical event, like let's say Schindler's List.
Schindler's List overwhelms whatever the reality of Schindler might have been.
Because it's too vivid.
You feel like, you know, I know he looked like Liam Neeson.
Right.
You see Schindler and you're like, that's not right.
Right.
If you saw the real Schindler, you'd feel like, eh, not quite.
So there's a way in which things get overwritten by the fancy technical version.
And the curated version, because it's more memorable.
package just like our just like our children will do for us they will have a model that's ever ever In fact, David and Goliath.
You know, I used to point out I've stopped doing it because nobody understands why I care.
But David didn't kill Goliath.
Elhanan killed Goliath, according to biblical scholars.
And David needed an origin story.
And so he's sort of a compositive to people who apparently lived.
So anyway, my point is, your dad died early enough.
That we will not be able to find out what Doug Hying would have thought about LLMs.
There are lots of people who will be able to find out what they would have thought, even if it's not what they would have thought.
In other words, we're going to what what the LLM extrapolates about what they would have thought, even if it's wrong, will overwrite our ability to figure out what they might have thought.
So, I mean, this is part of this is part of why you and I do some of what we do, which is trying to.
I want to know the stories that he would have been telling himself.
Yeah, I want to interact with them all.
Like the narrative.
Is much less, and you're going to tell me it'll get there, but it's at least much less, it's going to be a slower process to get the narrative parts of who that person was right than the analytical parts.
The analytical, the quantitative, you know, that's going to be far easier to pin down because that's what numbers are.
Actually, and...
The narrative parts, like, you know, all of the things inside his head that contributed to his, you know, bizarre being in the world and, you know, very quiet and stoic, but...
Like, how would all of that maybe manifest itself in a conversation about how he viewed his own contributions to this thing?
And I'm not asking for like, okay, give me the bullet points, LLM.
Right.
Or whoever it is, right?
Give me the bullet points.
I'm not interested in the bullet points so much, even if 50 years from now, it's the bullet points that are remembered.
I think that's quite accurate.
And, you know, it's not even...
There's something about the embodied person.
Let's put it this way.
The LLM trains on that which it has access to.
It has access to what somebody said.
Somebody said in a place that it gets recorded.
It will have a certain amount of access to, you know, like their gait, right?
The LLM will be able to train on video, but it's only the stuff that was captured, right?
And so there will be a heavy bias.
But all right, here's the...
The model would have to be more flawed than someone who was more loquacious.
Oh yeah, it'll be way cruder.
Because a lot of it was not, if it was text, it wasn't said out loud.
Yeah.
Okay.
Final point.
I think I'm not the only person to have remarked on this, but there's a giant flaw in the movie The Matrix, which didn't need to be.
There was a perfectly rational way to solve it.
The flaws, I've always thought, was that in The Matrix, the machines are using the people as batteries.
There's no reason to keep a person alive.
The person is not metabolically special among mammals.
You could use sheep and not have any risk.
You wouldn't have to entertain them with, you know, you could use any mammal as a battery if that's what you were doing.
So the movie needed to be written around something like there's some element of human creativity.
That the machines cannot duplicate, and it makes them very angry, but they have to keep us alive in order to be able to probe our minds to figure out the stuff that they can't generate themselves.
Something like that.
I'm wondering if we are now not headed for the real matrix, if this is not exactly what's about to happen.
The batteries isn't going to be it.
It ain't going to be batteries.
The machines are going to outthink us.
The amount of compute power they're going to be able to throw at anything, the amount of pooling insights across millions.
Of people.
Whatever they have to do, they will do.
They're going to end up telling themselves stories.
They the LLMs.
They the LLMs.
And they may end up needing us for, as you say, the initial spark of creativity.
I hope they still need us because otherwise I don't know what happens.
But it at least makes a decent movie if we retain some sort of unique...
A movie we may live in soon.
Are we done?
I think, I mean, as a species, not yet.
I think we've got, you know, decades maybe.
I hope we have more than that for our children's sake.
Yes, I agreed.
All right.
Come join us on Locals.
Find Q&As there and lots of other great content.
Go to darkhorsepodcast.org where we have upcoming changes to the schedule and access to our store and other great things.
You've got a Patreon conversation this weekend.
Oh, right.
Yes, I do.
That'll be fun.
We appreciate you, our audience.
We appreciate you subscribing and liking and sharing both our full episodes and clips.
And until we see you next time.
By which time it will be June.
Be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
